The present invention relates to a karaoke apparatus, in which timbres of a karaoke accompaniment can be easily modified, and timbre kinds can be updated through on-line data downloading.
In the prior art, a sound source karaoke apparatus performs a karaoke accompaniment by driving an internal sound source device according to song data. The song data has a sequential format in which a timbre, a pitch and a volume of musical sound are prescribed in time series. The karaoke sound is reproduced by driving the sound source device according to the song data. The sound source device employed in the conventional karaoke apparatus is typically a PCM sound source. In the PCM sound source device, a waveform of a natural musical instrument is digitally sampled and prestored in the form of PCM data. The prestored PCM data is read out in response to a request in order to reproduce the waveform of the musical sound. In the PCM sound source device, a memory capacity in the order of 700 kbits is required to store one second length of the PCM sampling data in a CD (Compact Disc) quality (44.1 kHz). The whole sampling data has a total length in the order of several seconds so that several megabits of data size are required for the whole PCM data. Further in the PCM sound source device, the PCM sampling data could not be stored in economic rewriteable storage devices such as disk memory devices, but the PCM sampling data should be stored in a specific memory device such as a ROM which can be accessed at high speed, since the sampling data should be read out in real-time to reproduce the waveform of the musical sound. For this reason, the PCM sound source device included in the karaoke apparatus employs the ROM for storing the sampling data, so that the timbre of the karaoke sound cannot be modified. The conventional karaoke apparatus prestores a plurality of waveforms representative of various timbre items. However, the number of the timbre items are limited, and the registered timbres are all typical ones to match with any of karaoke songs. In order to remedy these limitations, the conventional karaoke apparatus utilizes an effector having filtering function and being connected to the sound source device. The effector modifies a frequency spectrum of the waveform to impart variation to an original timbre of the typical waveform. However, the basic waveform is fixed so that a drastic variation of the timbre is not realized.